


too late for gods

by darkavengerz (darkavenger)



Series: Matt's loosely connected fics about Laura and Daken [7]
Category: Marvel, X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-22
Updated: 2014-12-22
Packaged: 2018-03-02 19:37:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2823647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darkavenger/pseuds/darkavengerz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set after the death of Wolverine, and following the events of the Logan's Legacy comics.</p><p>Laura mourns, in her own way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	too late for gods

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from an AFI song.

 

> “A heart's a heavy burden.”
> 
> ― Diana Wynne Jones, Howl's Moving Castle

 

The Wolverine is dead. Logan is dead...

...and Laura wonders if you can be an orphan when you never actually had parents in the first place. And she wonders why this always happens to her, why it is she can’t have anything. It seems like every time things seem like they’re getting better, every time she starts to build herself a life, it gets taken away. If there’s anything that the institute should have prepared her for, it was that. From the earliest age, she’d been taught that she was allowed nothing for herself. After all, she was not a person, but the property of the project, and an object cannot own other things. The idea is laughable.

But she’s _not_ an object. She’s a person. It wouldn’t hurt so much, otherwise.

Of course, she’s not alone. Not entirely. There are the X-Men, of course, Logan’s sprawling, extended family, and now her’s too.

At first, she had been resentful of them, and resentful of Logan’s insistence that she learn to be one of them. Who were they to her, after all, and more importantly, who was she to them? Damaged in ways uncommon even to mutant children, a danger to her so-called peers, outcast among the outcasts, it seemed even there her only place was to be a weapon, utilised in the service of other people’s agendas, always without agency of her own. But that had changed.  Slowly, painfully, she found her place. Found herself a family. Yes, she has others now. Gambit, Jubilee. Cessily, Sooraya, and the others. Even here, with Cyclops’ renegade X-Men she is among friends, among those who care for her, and those who share her loss, her grief. Logan was like a father to Kitty too, maybe more of a father to her than he ever was to Laura.

Perhaps that is why it is that anger comes easier to her than sorrow. She tells herself it is anger at the men who killed Logan, the scientist with his cold, calculating plans to make weapons out of people. He is the one who deserves her anger. To be angry at Logan for this, his death, would be irrational. He had made many errors when it came to her - but he never meant to leave her.

Yet, whether he meant to or not, he had. And maybe she wasn’t alone. No, Kitty was there, with her sympathy and her desire to help Laura, and Angel was too, in his own awkward, teenage way - but neither of them understood. Kitty had lost Logan too, and Kitty could cry, and Kitty could mourn, and then, eventually, Kitty could move on. Laura couldn’t. She still needed Logan. Who else could understand what she had gone through, who else could help her learn her own nature? They were made of the same flesh, the same blood and bone, the same rage.

So she gives in to that rage for a while.

It keeps her moving, gives her direction, but it’s all so empty. Underneath it all, she still feels so cold. Her sense of herself, as poor and weak as it was to start with, wanes. So she paints herself bright with a reminder. All that she inherited from Logan, his genetics, his mutant abilities, his horrors, his rage - she also inherited this: the urge to be more than the sum of her parts, more than what she was created to be.

Laura does not believe she deserves to call herself a hero, does not know, after all that she has done, if she ever will. But she knows that Logan would tell her to try. He had atrocities of his own to atone for, she knows. So she will follow in his footsteps, and hope the path he took will lead her that much closer to redemption.

And if the path she’s chosen is a lonely one, then it’s no worse than she’s faced before.

So then, just as she’s once more rebuilding, life, of course, has to throw her a curveball.

Daken.

Back from the dead, and locked in a cell with her.

Just like that, she’s not alone. Not, of course, that that’s a good thing, in this case. If Logan, for all his many flaws, was her best hope for what she could become,  then Daken is her worst fear realised. A monster, with manners.

And the closest thing to a living relation she has.

Laura hasn’t yet developed the capacity to parse the conflicting mess of emotions seeing him evokes. It’s enough to know her reaction isn’t wholly negative. And she may not be any kind of expert at deciphering other people’s thoughts or feelings, let alone the thoughts or feelings of someone like Daken, who lives behind masks more than any costumed hero does, but she knows, on that strange, instinctual level that exists between them, that he isn’t unhappy to see her either.

Perhaps death changed him, Logan’s if not his own.


End file.
